National Politics • Tom DeLay
He has a message for GOP members of the U.S. House: Forty lashes if you stray.
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While the White House has cut down on the House Republicans’ legislative success, no such obstacle has stood in the way of DeLay’s fundraising for his GOP colleagues. The Hammer has come down hard, for instance, on lobbyists who control the contributions of political action committees (PACs), especially business lobbyists who have been in the habit of giving to Democrats. “We keep a very close eye on the money,” he told me. He keeps at hand a GOP compilation that lists contributions by the four hundred largest PACs to Republicans and Democrats and evaluates each PAC as “friendly” or “unfriendly.” And he makes a point of showing lobbyists where their PAC ranks. This is not exactly the sort of procedure that you read about in civics textbooks, but DeLay offers no apology for his tactics. His defense—actually, it’s more of an attack—is that there can be no lasting revolution in policy unless there is also a revolution in fundraising.
“There’s been a Democratic mind-set in this town for forty years,” he said. “Lobbyists were Democrats because they had to be Democrats to succeed. Do you think they want us to be in power? They’re telling their organizations, ‘We’d better hedge our bets. Democrats might take back the House.’” Apparently lobbyists are getting the message. “Business money used to be sixty-forty Democratic,” said DeLay. “We’ve switched it to sixty-forty Republican.” And those who hold fast to their old Democratic loyalties run the risk of losing their jobs; DeLay has been known to call a lobbyist’s boss to complain. “We don’t like to deal with people who are trying to kill the revolution,” DeLay told the Washington Post last year. “We know who they are. The word is out.”
DeLay’s emergence as one of the most powerful politicians in Washington and the key figure in the GOP’s battle to hold the House comes as something of a surprise to old hands at the Texas Capitol. A state House member for three terms before he went to Congress, DeLay is remembered as a congenial, middle-of-the-pack legislator whose chief interest was trucking deregulation. He wasn’t particularly partisan; his own memory of the time is that aside from the handful of liberals who sat together on the floor in an area called Red Square, “there wasn’t a dime’s difference between Democrats and Republicans.” He was a regular on the hunting trips and golf outings where lawmakers got to know each other, and he learned the importance of personal relationships. By the time he left, he was a good one-on-one politician and an accurate judge of how votes would come out.
Those skills are not enough to make you a star in Austin, where the Speaker and a few veteran committee chairs run the show, but Washington is a different story. The House is so unwieldy, its membership spread out in a quarter mile of office buildings across the street from the Capitol, that the leadership is always in need of a gregarious inside operator like DeLay. In 1985 he was the freshman representative on the Republican Committee on Committees, which gave him a chance to gather chits by helping members get the committee assignments they wanted. In his second term he won a plum appointment to the Appropriations Committee, where he was a successful pork-barrel politician ($64 million for the Southwest Freeway bus lane; $50 million for Houston Metro). His conservative ideology drew him to the young turks, led by Newt Gingrich, who were unhappy with the go-along-to-get-along attitude of the old-guard leaders, but his ambition drew him to the leadership. In 1989 he had to choose, and he chose wrong. Minority Whip Dick Cheney left the House to become Secretary of Defense, and in the race to pick his successor, DeLay ran the campaign of Gingrich’s old-guard opponent, Illinois congressman Edward Madigan. Gingrich won, 84–82. “I had to start over,” recalled DeLay. “I was at the bottom.”
Looking around for a way to recover, he decided to run for chairman of the Republican Study Committee. It had been founded in the seventies as a protest vehicle for conservatives who regarded Richard Nixon as too friendly to big government, but it had lost its ideological zeal and had turned into a research group. DeLay used his connections—he was friendly with the executive director of the committee—to win the election handily. Meanwhile, conservatives in and out of the House were looking for someone to lead the opposition to another GOP president they regarded as too friendly to big government: George Bush. DeLay was the right person in the right place at the right time, and after he fought Bush’s 1990 tax increase, his conservative credentials were impeccable. He moved up to a minor leadership position in 1992, and after the Republicans captured the House in 1994, he defeated Gingrich’s closest ally, Bob Walker of Pennsylvania, to become whip.
Such a career suggests that DeLay is less of a pure ideologue than he is often portrayed to be. When the Legislature was nonconfrontational, he was nonconfrontational; when the Republican leadership in Congress was accommodationist, he was accommodationist; when the conservative tide rolled across the House and the nation, he rode it. He has the knack for politics to get ahead in almost any circumstance.
But there is one issue on which the former pesticide sprayer is as hard-line and unyielding as anybody in American politics: the environment. When I brought it up, he suddenly let go of his amiable, relaxed mood, pulled himself out of his lounging position onto the edge of his seat cushion, and reached down to hitch up his trousers, as if to gird himself for battle. “Now, you’re going to think I’m crazy,” he said. “I read a book by Elizabeth Whelan, called Toxic Terror. She tells how the modern environmental movement started with protests against nuclear testing. They were very successful, raised lots of money, but after the test-ban treaty, they had nowhere to go. Then came Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, about DDT. That became the next cause. But there is no scientific evidence in the book. I refuse to base environmental policy on political motives or bad science.”
He was rolling now. “When we passed the Clean Air Act during the Bush administration, there was a forty-to-fifty-billion-dollar program for acid rain in the bill. The government was winding up a ten-year study with a hundred scientists, a hundred million dollars, to study acid rain. We said, wait for the study. But the bill passed before the scientific work was done. The EPA will tell you that the study would have shown that there is no acid rain.
“Do you know about the lakes in the Northeast?” he asked.
I said that I did; I had been to the Adirondack Mountains in New York State last summer, and the guidebook I used was full of references to lakes that had been rendered sterile by acid rain.
“The lakes are not acidified,” DeLay insisted. “It rains a lot up there, and the water comes down through the forest floor, through the minerals in the soil. That’s where the acid comes from. You don’t need billions of dollars to fix the problem. Just sprinkle a little lime to neutralize the acid.”
Ah, yes. I remembered my high school chemistry: An acid plus a base yields a salt.
“The Democrats accuse us of rolling back fifty years of environmental laws,” he continued. “We haven’t rolled back one.”
DeLay had one more base to touch: global warming. “It’s the arrogance of man to think that man can change the climate of the world,” he said. “Only nature can change the climate. A volcano, for instance.”
His own eruption past, DeLay sank back into the comfort of his chair. I didn’t think he was crazy. I did think he had lost one of the qualities that you want a political leader to have: a basic degree of respect for his opponents. Of course, most Democrats have exactly the same attitude about DeLay and the conservative Republicans. You have to believe, in a democracy, that the other side is capable of—and worthy of—governing. But that does not seem to be a commonly held belief in Washington these days.
In any case, DeLay is determined to see that the Democrats don’t get the chance. “We’re in great shape for the election,” he told me. “At worst we’re five points down on the generic question, Would you vote Republican or Democrat for Congress? We were fourteen points down at this point in ’92 and we gained seats. We were ten points down in ’94 and we took the Congress.” He grinned, all the way to his eyes again. “We’re right where we want to be.”
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